


Guardian

by IamShadow21



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Baby Teddy Lupin, Battle of Hogwarts, Caretaking, Cross-Generation Relationship, Disability, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Falling In Love, Family, Full Moon, Gift Fic, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Not Epilogue Compliant, Not Underage, POV First Person, POV Remus Lupin, Parenthood, Post - Deathly Hallows, Rebuilding, Recovery, Remus Lupin Lives, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-10-16
Updated: 2008-10-16
Packaged: 2018-01-03 08:18:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1068171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IamShadow21/pseuds/IamShadow21
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the final battle, Remus just wants to hide away. Harry won't let him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Guardian

**Author's Note:**

  * For [magicofisis](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=magicofisis).



> For you, magicofisis!
> 
> Remus/Harry is one of those ships that I really like the idea of, but I find it really hard to find stories that I like. This is my first ever attempt at writing this pairing with a romantic element. I hope you enjoy it. :)

The morning after the Battle, I woke up lying next to my wife. Those survivors who were moving the bodies that day found that I had turned onto my side under my shroud and drawn her into my arms. I don’t remember it. Most of the time, I think that’s a small mercy. Other times, I think that retaining that memory might have given me a bit more closure. 

The first memory I had, post-Battle, was the Healers at St. Mungo’s bringing me out of their spell-induced sleep, ten days later. I was still seriously unwell, but the Full Moon was due to rise and they didn’t want to risk me going through the transformation in an unlocked ward, unconscious or no. So, appropriately, my first moments were filled with pain. My wife had been buried a week earlier, and I battered my weakened body as much as I was able against the blank, white walls of the same containment cell in which I’d suffered through my first transformation at the age of seven. When I Changed back, miserable and sore, I lay there and imagined that the smallest, finest gouges in the stone were from those baby claws. The marks probably weren’t mine, but it gave me an odd feeling of comfort to think that they might be, and I ran my fingertips along the nearest, over and over, until the Mediwizard unbarred the door at dawn.

At noon, Harry arrived to take me home.

***

He wouldn’t leave me alone. 

I craved solitude. Invisibility. The same kind of life I’d lived for over a decade after the First War. It was a lonely, depressing existence, but it was what I knew and what I was most familiar with. Teddy was with his grandmother. Theoretically, until I was well, but both of us knew but didn’t say that perhaps it would be for a much longer term than that. I loved my son, but to me he was a living reminder that I hadn’t loved his mother well enough. And how would I care for a child around the Full Moon, especially a baby who still needed feeding several times a night?

I tried to slowly fade away, telling myself it was for Teddy’s own good. My visits became briefer, less regular. I told myself that if I held him less and kept my distance that it wouldn’t hurt him, or me, as much when I finally slid out of his life altogether, besides the requisite birthday and Christmas visits.

Then Harry turned up on my doorstep one day with my infant son in a colourful sling across his chest and a look of such disappointment and reproof in his eyes that I felt utterly ashamed. He didn’t say a word of admonishment, though I knew that he likely wanted to shout and rage at me as he had a year ago at Grimmauld Place. Instead, he passed me my son with a practiced ease, and slipped into my tiny kitchen to boil the kettle for tea.

I stood there, uncomfortably holding Teddy (who appeared to have doubled in size in less than three weeks) and wondered how it had come to be that a young man not yet eighteen could look so natural handling a baby, when I, who’d given Teddy life, felt nothing but nerves and guilt and grief. I went and sat down in an armchair for fear I’d lose my grip somehow and drop him. 

Harry didn’t stay longer than about two hours, and we didn’t talk about much of importance. When he settled Teddy back into his sling and left, I went upstairs, stretched out on top of the bedclothes, and sobbed.

The next week, Harry, babe in arms, returned. And the week after that. And that.

Teddy grew, and giggled, and babbled, and reached for me when he saw me. After a few weeks, I found myself holding my hands out for him, and Harry would pass him over immediately. Gradually, I could look at my son, and though I still saw in him my wife’s features and the dark grey eyes she and Sirius had both possessed, the pain became tolerable. 

Harry would talk about Auror training, about laws being passed by the Interim Minister and the Wizengamot, and rarely, very rarely, about the trials. He didn’t ask me what I did with my time, and I didn’t offer much. I didn’t want to admit that I still tired very easily, and that I spent most of my days reading, cooking or gardening only in short bursts, and taking long naps to recuperate.

After a couple of months of visits, he turned up alone, a week before the Full Moon.

“Here,” he said, pushing a large bottle made of thick, dark glass into my hands. It was almost hot to the touch. A warming charm had been cast on it to preserve the contents. I opened my mouth to protest, to politely decline, though I knew what was inside and knew that I desperately needed it, were I ever to recover my former strength.

“It’ll work,” Harry said, unintentionally, or perhaps deliberately, misinterpreting my reluctance. “Slughorn made it, not some dodgy apothecary. He’s a git, but I trust him. There’s enough for the whole week.”

I bit back my refusal, knowing immediately that Slughorn wouldn’t have asked for money, but for Harry’s appearance at the dinners and parties he hosted. “Thank you,” I said softly, knowing from our conversations that Harry hated such ostentatiousness, and guessing how much pride he must have swallowed to make such an agreement.

Harry was back on my doorstep a week later with my son, and several weeks after that with another bottle of Wolfsbane. From then on, he also appeared with regularity in the society pages, wearing his dress robes and a thin, tolerant smile.

***

We slipped into a kind of rhythm. I found myself anticipating Harry’s visits rather than resigning myself to them. Teddy crawled, then walked and talked, and then it became impossible to stop him talking. Harry completed his first year of training with distinction. 

With the Wolfsbane, I noticed an overall improvement in my health. Though I never regained quite the same amount of vigour, I could walk down the road to the village and back without being exhausted for the rest of the day. I took up working again, placing an advertisement under a pseudonym offering Owl services as a proof-reader and fact-checker, and slowly I began to regain some independence. 

As Teddy grew older, Harry began bringing him for ‘stay-overs’. He was sleeping through most of the night, and so long as he wasn’t overexcited or kept up too late, he settled remarkably easily. Harry would engorge the couch for himself, and take Teddy back to his grandmother’s home after breakfast. As time went on, they’d stay for several nights at a time. Harry would Apparate to work, and I’d spend exhaustive, happy, never dull days entertaining, feeding, cleaning and chasing after Teddy. I began to feel like a parent, rather than a doting uncle.

I didn’t really take note of when Harry started coming over the day after the Full Moon, as well. I’d wake with a Warmed blanket wrapped around my naked form. After dressing, I would descend the stairs as swiftly as my stiff and aching joints and muscles would allow and find Harry laying out a full breakfast of tea, toast, eggs and thick, juicy bacon. I’d eat my fill, then he’d walk me back upstairs – slower this time – and help me into bed, and I’d sleep the day away. 

“You shouldn’t,” I said, meaning, _it’s dangerous, I’m dangerous._

“I want to,” he said, stubbornly. “You need me.”

I could have argued that I had weathered dozens of Changes, alone, for years, but I sensed that maybe it was more that he needed to take care of me. I was just another person he was determined to save, even if true salvation for me was impossible. He couldn’t rescue me from my disease.

***

A month before Teddy turned three, even the Wolfsbane wasn’t enough to prevent the Moon from being a bad one. A blue moon was always difficult, but this one coincided with violent weather, and the cold and the atmospheric pressure made muscles and tendons that would usually stretch and grow to accommodate the Change tear and snap. 

Like that day in St. Mungo’s, I stirred to find myself on a cold, hard floor, my body on fire with the pain. I drifted in and out as gentle hands moved over me, soothing the worst of the hurts, and finally, I felt myself levitated into bed and covered in soft quilts.

Hours later, I woke to a warm wash of breath moving past my cheek, tickling the fine, grey hair that had been growing long. The last of the brown had disappeared after the Battle; whether from stress, illness, grief or simply age I wasn’t sure.

Someone warm was curled up against me in a way that felt instantly familiar. When I was young and foolish, and Wolfsbane was just an impossible dream in an obscure potioneer’s brain, Sirius would wrap himself around me in the aftermath of a Moon to warm me, skin to skin, utterly unselfconscious. James sometimes did, too, but mostly it was Sirius, to whom dignity and modesty were nothing compared to helping a friend. Helping me.

I opened my eyes and looked directly into Harry’s troubled green ones.

“I’ll be all right,” I rasped. “Been worse.”

“You were so cold,” Harry whispered, and it was the voice of a frightened child. “I thought... for a minute, I thought...”

It jolted me. This boy, whom I’d been relying on so heavily, for so long, was reduced to white-lipped terror at the thought of losing me. I’d let him in too close, too often. 

“I’m sorry. It’s hard sometimes, even with the Wolfsbane,” I explained. Harry still appeared stricken and hurt, as though he felt that he, personally, had failed me. I sighed. “I’ve upset you. Perhaps it’s best if you don’t come for the Moon again. I can manage well enough on my own.” I attempted a reassuring smile, but it felt more like a grimace.

Harry didn’t seem placated; rather, he looked frustrated and almost angry, much like he had that day on the doorstep when he’d brought me my son and refused to let me hide. “You _can’t_ ,” Harry said fiercely, his eyes a little wild, possessive and intense. “I won’t let you.” 

A second later, when he leaned forward to press his lips firmly against mine, I realised I’d completely misjudged why he’d done so much for me, why he’d slowly made himself more and more a part of my life. I’d thought of obligation, responsibility, and his predictable and infuriating tendency to try and save everyone around him. I’d never even once considered love.

As I reached up to cup his cheek and slowly, tenderly, kissed him back, I knew that pushing Harry out of my life was going to be a much more difficult exercise than I’d anticipated. I certainly felt far too much happiness at the prospect that it might be completely impossible.


End file.
